Why YSK? Comments you reply positively to, should definitely get your upvote. Comments you disagree with should be at your discretion. Trolls deserve downvotes (seriously, they live for those). Disagreeing with someone in the midst of a good discussion doesn’t necessarily warrant one, and might deserve an upvote. Even if you don’t reply, but you agree with the comment, give it your vote.
Also, this has nothing to do with propping up folks’ egos. Comments with more upvotes will likely be seen first the longer the post is up. Alternatively, downvoted posts are less likely to be seen unless users are looking for them.
Of course, this can lead to folks accusing communities of having leftist/right-wing bias, but I think overall it improves the usage of the site. Personally, the thing I liked most about Reddit was the conversations in the comments. Usually the ones with the most upvotes were more worth the read & engagement.
How are posts moved up the main page or top or hot? Is it based off upvotes, or boosts? I don’t even know the difference.
Me neither. Following the logic of the name, boosting should help the post rise up. Following the same logic, upvotes and downvotes don’t influence the position of the comments and posts. Yet, the reputation of a given user seems to be affected by the amount of boosts and downvotes, but not the amount of upvotes.
Maybe that’s still WIP, though, I never bothered to look it up.
What is a boost?
KBin and Mastodon thing. In Mastodon it reposts the post to your own followers. What it does on Kbin I dont know.
aha cheers, that explains why I am not seeing it (I’m in Lemmy)
I suspect it’s similar on kbin? Cause you can follow people on kbin and also see “microblogs” (Mastodon style comments). Though I’m not really sure where exactly it displays and if it is different for boosting a thread vs a comment. It’s not a feature that personally interests me much. I mostly just hit it by accident sometimes lol.
Lemmy doesn’t expose boosts in the UI (those are a thing on Kbin and some other ActivityPub services, but not Lemmy), so it can’t be that.